Marketing in Nutshell
Marketing is a primary component of business management and commerce. It is defined by the activities undertaken by a company to promote the sale of their products or services.
It can also be understood as a catalyst in consumer decisions for buying a product or service.
Broadly marketing can be grouped under online and offline channels. Online Marketing is mainly through SEM, social media, and email marketing, whereas Offline Marketing is carried out through traditional media like television, radio, print, and other offline channels like billboards, events, banners, etc.
Marketing is carried out in 3 stages Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP) of the product.
Segmentation happens based on Demography, Geography, Psychology, Behavioural, and Benefits based. This is evaluated using MAADS framework.
Targeting is carried out using strategies like Mass Marketing, Segmented Marketing and Niche Marketing.
Positioning includes considering components like Product, Price, Place, and Promotion (4P's) channels. The evaluation of product positioning is done through perpetual maps.
The companies usually follow the above process through the STP framework until they achieve stable sales targets. Every product lifecycle includes four stages initial, growth, stable and decline. During the declining stage, the companies may take a call for discontinuing a product.
Let's take a simple example, say you launched a school fair for students from class 1 to 10, and you have a budget of 50 bucks as an initial investment. You decided to prepare 3 different kinds of chocolate- candies, milk bar and chocolate bars since you classified your audience based on demographic segmentation considering their age and psychology.
Since you knew all children would not buy sweets you used segment-based targeting by creating 3 groups primary, secondary grade, and high school going while targeting more playful students as they will tend to burn out more.
You placed your candy shop next to the school gate while keeping the price of candies low, than that of the price of milk and chocolate bars which were medium to high. You considered such a placement since high school kids get pocket money whereas primary class students normally don't carry cash. You also used banners in the entryway and school bulletin board to promote your sweet shop. The total sales were 100 bucks which gave a profit of 50 bucks.
With this example, you understood how marketing is carried out using the STP framework and 4P's of positioning your product is carried out to generate high revenue.
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Happy Management! Happy Marketing!